The present invention relates to a printing device for printing images, such as characters/symbols on a tape.
Conventionally, there are various proposals for a printing device for printing desired character trains onto a tape as a recording medium having a width of about 10 mm. The present assignee proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,066,152 that a printing device by which desired characters and symbols are selectively inputted while a character selection dial is rotated, these input characters and the like are printed onto a tape with use of a thermal head in response to the operation of print keys and the tape on which the characters and the like have been printed is adhered to a desired location of a file or the like.
Further, the present assignee proposed in the U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07/831,971 a printing device by which the print region on print tape having a width of about 10 mm is divided into two portions along a tape width direction to provide two print lines, and input characters are printed on a desired print line by using a dot pattern having a small character size of printing characters to the two print lines.
Incidentally, it can be contemplated to prepare many kinds of print tapes having widths of, for example, 12 mm, 18 mm . . . 24 mm so that these tapes can be adhered to many kinds of portions of a file, notebook and the like. Further, it can be also contemplated to print characters on many lines such as 3, 4 or 5 lines.
However, the printing device proposed by the present assignee in Japanese Patent Application HEI 3-91492 is arranged to print characters to 1 or 2lines by using a relatively narrow print tape having a tape width of about 10 mm. In this case, even if a plurality of kinds of dot pattern data for characters and symbols can be provided in correspondence with a plurality of kinds of character sizes, the size of characters to be printed is roughly aimed at and manually set in accordance with a tape width to which the size of characters to be printed is applied and the number of lines of the characters to be printed. The character size is not optimized in many cases. Thus, a problem arises in that an operation for setting an optimum character size based on a tape width and the number of lines is made complex.